Improve your Email Marketing

Many of you are hopefully using email marketing to market your business. This week, we would like to share some helpful insights to how you can easily improve your email opening and click rates!

Improve your Opening Rates

1) Keep Your Subject Lines Short

According to this industry report the length of your subject lines has a great effect on opening rates. In general you should always attempt to keep your subject line to a maximum of 35-40 characters. But if you can keep it between 4-15 characters, you are likely to get the best results according to the trend. Therefore, you have to be creative in order to get your message through in a short and precise way.

2) Beware of Spam Filters

Choose your words carefully if you want to avoid reaching your customers' spam filters instead of their inbox. Avoid using trigger words in your subject line like “Discount", "50%", "Free” and other words that often appear in spam mails. Find the ultimate list of email spam trigger words here.

3) Make it Easy to Unsubscribe

In many countries this is actually law. But that should not be the only reason why you include the “unsubscribe” button to your emails. If people can't unsubscribe there is a great chance they will mark you as “spam” instead in order to remove your emails from their inbox, and that can actually make it hard for you to reach other customers with the same mail client in the future. By letting customers go easily with an unsubscribe button, you automatically increase your opening rates because the people, who normally don’t open your emails, disappear from your list.

4) Test Your Emails

Most mail providers such as Mailchimp, give you the option of testing your e-mails. One way to do this is an A/B split campaign, where you can test different subject lines, calls-to-action and more on a small percentage of your list. Once you know which version performs best, the rest of your list will receive the winning e-mail. This increases your chance of either a higher opening rate or a higher click rate depending on what you test.

Improve your Click Rates

5) Personalize Your Emails

It has been argued many times whether or not the name of the customers should or should not be included in the email. But according to experts, using your customer's name and last name has the most positive effect on click rates!

6) Motivate Your Users

When using direct marketing in general, there are some motivation factors you can always focus on to get people to react on your emails.

Create a sense of urgency – If people feel they might be missing out on something, they are more likely to act. E.g. “This offer expires today!”

Remember that people are greedy – Make them an offer they can’t refuse like “Save 50%” or "Buy two get one for free"

Provide valuable information – Tell them something they don’t know. Never the other way around! Don’t make them feel like they are wasting their time.

Convenience is key – People are busy. Make it easy for them to do what YOU want. Make it easy to understand what links and buttons lead to and how clicking them can benefit your customers.